Aughinblog: Key West Florida

We have recently spent the last week here in Key West, well actually Marathon Key. We are not too far away from the legendary 7 Mile Bridge. Our first impression of the Keys are, "we drove all the way down here for this." Don't get me wrong, we are grateful to be able to enjoy the warm weather for a few days and it surely does beat sitting in 20 degrees in many parts of our country, however it truly is not what we expected. We have been to some really nice places over the years and I would say other than the weather, Key West is a little rundown and needs some sprucing up! We are having fun though and we have done some really cool educational things while we were here. Tomorrow we are moving out to Naples for a few days before we head out on our cruise next Monday. Here are few things that we have done here at the keys.

We visited Mel Fisher's Treasure museum. This guy is pretty famous around these parts. Not only is he famous here but around the world. Mel and his team have found some of the richest shipwrecks in the history of shipwreck recovery. I remember years ago seeing a History Channel documentary on him and always wanting to visit his museum. Well, we had a chance and some of the things on display are really cool and really valuable! I can not believe that some of those treasures are just sitting there. A few years ago, I read that they were broken into and some gold bars were stolen! YIKES! that would ruin your day. Anyway, it was fun and I always enjoy seeing the kids faces when they are learning cool stuff like this.

Next, we visited Mallory Square. This was pretty neat to see with a whole lot of street performers out when we arrived. There was also a Royal Caribbean cruise ship that had docked so there were many people standing around and watching the performers. There were also many homeless, young vagabond travelers as well as weird, just plain weird, things going on. It definitely is not a place that I would go back to.

After that we took the kids for some ice cream, saw the southern most point of the continental US and headed back to the campground.

The following day we went to the Key West Botanical Gardens. As a family, we always try to visit a botanical garden everywhere we go. I, being a gardener and plant lover, just love to visit these places and see the hand of God in all his Glory. There are so many plants that we see that we are just awestruck at God's creativity. I mean some of these plants are so neat and cool looking only God can come up with them!

We also got to go fishing here at the docks at the campground, swam in the water and met some new people! It is always fun just to ride bikes, make new friends, and hang out with the kids.